Blur Bassist Slams Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones for Their Age

Alex James, bassist with ‘90s Britpop band Blur, slammed Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones for their age, accusing the veteran groups of pretending to be teenagers.

Along with his musical career, James is a newspaper columnist and an award-winning cheesemaker.

“There are rumors of Led Zeppelin getting back together, and nobody really wants to hear their fucking new record, do they?” he told the Mirror in a new interview. “They want to listen to ‘Stairway to Heaven.' How old were they when they did ‘Stairway to Heaven’? Like 20 or something? And how old are they now,? They are fucking 70.”

James insisted he’d “rather be on a cheese counter than pretending to be a teenager." “At least people want to come in and try my cheese as well as listen to [Blur track] ‘Parklife,’" he said. "That is really important. I think it’s really good that I’ve got something else to talk about. You have to do it, otherwise you become this weird, grotesque caricature of yourself by the time you get old like Mick Jagger.”

At that point he turned his ire on the Stones, saying he’d been listening to them recently, but “wouldn’t fucking go and listen to them live.” “You can’t be Jumping Jack when you are seventy-fucking-eight,” he added.

In the same interview, James appeared to perform an about-turn by criticizing R&B and pop star Kelis for refusing to perform her 2003 hit “Milkshake” at his Big Feastival event at his farm in England. "She’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t do that any more.' It’s like, ‘For fuck’s sake, it’s not like you’ve got loads of hits, darling, you need to do that one.' So I wouldn’t have her back.”